Canada’s long struggle for reproductive rights

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is simply looking to place intimate reproductive decisions back in the hands of individual Canadian women.

Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw, who directed the Hamilton Birth Control Society, risked imprisonment to provide birth control options to women during the Great Depression.

By:Marilla McCargar Published on Mon Jun 02 2014

As a historian, I have watched the response to Justin Trudeau’s abortion policy with interest. The reaction from pundits has been frustrating but informative, and demonstrates the continued fight from reproductive rights advocates and their allies like Trudeau to put the intimate decisions about contraception and abortion into the hands of the women they affect.

Canadian women have always sought to control their fertility. Extended breastfeeding and withdrawal were widely used by First Nations people and European colonists. In the 18th and 19th centuries, pessaries and vaginal douching were also used to prevent contraception. Women seeking to end pregnancies took pills such as Dr. Love’s “celebrated pills for suppressed menstruation” to induce miscarriages.

Before the 19th century, abortion before the “quickening,” or first fetal movements usually during the fourth month of pregnancy, was not illegal. In 1810, New Brunswick became the first Canadian jurisdiction to criminalize abortion regardless of when it occurred, and other Canadian jurisdictions followed suit, culminating in the criminalization of all forms of contraception in 1892. This was a response to the dramatic decline in fertility among Canadian women at the end of the 19th century. In Ontario, the fertility rate declined by 44 per cent between 1871 and 1901 as Ontarians used the tools available to them to limit the size of their families.

Despite the changes to the Criminal Code, women continued to seek to control their bodies. Activists such as Dr. Elisabeth Bagshaw, who directed the Hamilton Birth Control Society, and Dorothea Palmer, who worked as a nurse for the Parents’ Information Bureau near Ottawa, risked imprisonment to provide birth control options during the Great Depression.

While the sexual revolution of the 1960s lessened the stigma of premarital sex, it did not provide more contraceptive options. The birth control pill was approved for use in Canada in 1960 but it was rarely prescribed to unmarried women. Instead it was limited to married women with children. The McGill student government produced the Birth Control Handbook in 1968 and sent millions of copies across North America so that women understood how to prevent pregnancy. Desperate readers travelled to Montreal seeking abortions at Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s clinic, which he operated illegally.

The 1969 decriminalization of abortion still left the decision to obtain a safe and legal abortion out of the hands of individual women. Women requiring abortions were forced to appear before a panel of (almost always male) doctors, called the Therapeutic Abortion Committee, which alone determined whether they were eligible for a legal abortion.

In 1970, activists from the Vancouver Women’s Caucus and across the country decided enough was enough. They knew that women were risking their lives to obtain illegal abortions due to Canada’s restrictive abortion law. Tired of having to convince doctors that they were mentally ill to obtain an abortion (one of the few reasons the doctors would support an abortion was if they believed the woman might kill herself), they travelled to Ottawa to protest the abortion law. On May 11, 1970, activists echoed the actions of the British suffragists by chaining themselves to the gallery railing of the House of Commons to demand autonomy in decision making for themselves and their families.

While the 1988 Supreme Court decision in R. v. Morgentaler struck down the 1969 abortion law and enabled abortions to be performed legally in Canada, the ability of women to obtain an abortion, now as ever, depends upon location and resources. There are few resources for women in the North or in rural areas, and travel costs to obtain an abortion can prove prohibitive. New Brunswick is the only province to require two doctor referrals and only covers the cost of abortions performed in hospitals. Prince Edward Island does not have any abortion providers.

Abortion is the only medical procedure not covered under the provincial reciprocal billing arrangement, meaning that if a woman lives for a short term in another province she must fly home to have her abortion covered through provincial medical funding. Mifepristone or RU-486, the pill that provides abortions up to nine weeks, has yet to be approved by Health Canada and would alleviate some of these problems of access. Hopefully, Trudeau’s commitment to reproductive rights in Canada would cause him to turn to these issues if elected.

Despite the hysteria from some commentators, Trudeau is hardly trampling the rights of MPs. Columnists such as the Star’s Susan Delacourt argue that by enforcing a pro-choice view on the new Liberal candidates, Trudeau can no longer consider himself “the champion of freedom and choice.” As I see it, Trudeau is simply looking to place the intimate reproductive decisions back in the hands of individual Canadian women, and respecting their ability to determine what is best for them and their families.

Marilla McCargar is a Ph.D student and teacher of history at Western University.